Why priests can't preach
Burke, Dennis
WHY PRIESTS CANT PREACH IT'S ALL IN THE PREPARATION DENNIS BURKE The rugged priest with the chiseled Bogart face stared down at a hundred seminarians in the lecture hall. "Going to bed with a...
...DENNIS BURKE lives in Ross, California...
...For I knew I was listening to a prophet, a man of prayer, a man who had seen the Burning Bush and yearned for the source of that fire...
...A biblically based homily requires every bit as much imagination and surprise as any other...
...not thinking, he lacks ideas...
...I know the integrity of the liturgy calls for the celebrant to give the homily...
...But let's say the priest lacks the time to prepare (which I don't believe-people always find time for what they deem is important), why not have the priests in a parish take turns preaching at all the Sunday Masses...
...Ordination does not necessarily include the charism of preaching...
...Well, I start reading a book on Monday...
...All are grist for sermons...
...Still, why can't priests preach...
...But it is not the only source...
...All the courses in the world-be they Scripture or homilet-ics-cannot make a man an excellent preacher...
...God speaks to us in a thousand ways: through a troubled son or daughter...
...a novel like Ron Hansen's Mariette in Ecstasy...
...They are overworked and often demoralized, and the thinning of their ranks will not make things easier...
...he yearned that all "might be one even as the Father and I are one...
...The priests, though obviously zealous, seemed absorbed-overwhelmed even-with their other ministries within the church...
...Long pause.] "He returned and worked the vineyard...
...a Protestant becomes a minister to preach the gospel...
...The young priest looked shocked...
...This is the kernel of what he said: "A man had a vineyard in the Napa Valley that had just been attacked by fungus...
...If the faithful are giving up the sacrament because of poor preaching, the integrity of the liturgy becomes a dispensable liturgical ideal...
...And when they sang out with male vigor, I thought of fighter pilots on the eve of a fateful mission, for there was an intensity about them: men conscious of their very mortality...
...The man then went to his other son...
...The result of this theological difference is that typically a priest sees preaching as a secondary aspect of his vocation...
...The great preacher must have the heart of a missionary: the burning desire to ride the shoulders of grace as it spins and turns the souls of the hearers to Christ...
...A priest is ordained to provide the Eucharist for the faith community within certain territorial boundaries...
...a new baby...
...long pause] Zinfandel...
...The Bible is the purest, richest source of God's word...
...Then on Saturday night I spend five or six hours writing it out word for word...
...the younger priest asked...
...A dull homily is a dull speech...
...He is completing a novel...
...Christ used the sights around him: farmers in the field, birds in the air...
...a newspaper story...
...Yet according to Father Frank McNulty of Newark, the self-esteem problem of priests is linked to good preaching: "It seems to me that better preachers get more affirmation," he told the National Catholic Reporter, "and that increases self-esteem...
...Only a handful of new priests will be ordained in the interim...
...No, God is in those brief moments before we decide or act, those moments when we catch ourselves considering things...
...Father Marty Jenco, the Servite priest kidnapped and imprisoned in Beirut for so many months, was preaching (or was it meditating...
...a person in a soup line...
...Five years ago he required priests in the archdiocese to take remedial courses in homilet-ics...
...A recent survey of priests conducted by Dean Hoge of The Catholic University found that "self-esteem" was their number-one concern...
...A priest should do no less...
...Reading his carefully written talk word for word like John Henry Newman, in a fervid, urgent voice, Jenco's eyes and face glistened with conviction...
...I believe that with evangelization playing second fiddle to other tasks, they simply don't prepare...
...I rest my case.nine hours...
...and lacking ideas-convictions...
...Not in the temptations that draw us or the impulses that propel us to what is wrong...
...My wife and I were assisting at Mass at Holy Redeemer with a church full of fine-looking men, most in their thirties and forties...
...The archbishop of San Francisco, John Quinn, is an excellent, albeit formal, preacher...
...From the back we could see their carefully trimmed hair and muscular shoulders, casual shirts and faded jeans...
...or a TV show like "NYPD Blue...
...It is a special kind of spirituality and a special kind of prayer that links the priest to the Spirit of Christ who was sent to bear witness to the Father's love for every person...
...Mesmerized...
...They put a few thoughts on the back of an envelope and "wing it...
...A couple of hours...
...Why not have designated preachers...
...Furthermore, there must be an explicitly spiritual component to the preparation...
...A preacher who does not read is not thinking...
...Zinfandel...'" [more laughter], "'will you help me in the vineyard?' Zinfandel replied: 'No, I'm busy.' But Zinfandel walked away, and had second thoughts...
...The older priest, who had a reputation as a preacher, inquired: "How long do you spend preparing...
...The laity want their preacher to speak from a heart that is full and a mind that is alive, for only then-short of a miracle-will the word of God pierce to their innermost soul...
...I think about my homily every spare moment, make notes...
...Part of the problem is the Catholic notion of priesthood...
...At one time there was a great hope that the renewal of Catholic biblical scholarship would enhance preaching...
...What does it mean to prepare...
...God is in our second thoughts," the frail priest explained...
...Recently, a seasoned pastor told me: "The new priests are part of the television generation...
...Some months ago, as I sat on the Archbishop's Pastoral Planning Commission in San Francisco, that scene from the 1950s came vividly to mind...
...A sociologist from the University of San Francisco was reporting that one of the lowest scores in a survey of 15,000 Catholics in San Francisco was in response to the statement: "[The priest] makes the gospel real through homilies that apply to our lives...
...By the year 2000, one-third of the priests in the Archdiocese of San Francisco will have retired or died...
...But, often as not, it has also meant that the cut-and-dried answers of the catechism have been replaced by a dreary fundamentalism: a mindless rehash or a slavish exegesis of the text just read...
...Going to bed with a woman is not the greatest sin a priest can commit," he declared...
...Yet, as one older priest told me, in the seminary the primary emphasis was on pastoral ministry rather than conversion of the world: "We were taught to be maintenance men...
...A Catholic becomes a priest to say Mass...
...His face wrinkled with calculation and I noticed the men crossing the street for coffee next to the old convent, now a hospice for the dying...
...Slender, balding, with glasses, he had a thin voice that at first was hard to pick up as he half-read from his notes...
...Every person in a congregation knows intuitively when the priest-preacher has not prepared, for the preacher fails to communicate that this time is sacred, for I desire to share with you what has set me on fire...
...Then, he answered: "I thought about it all week, made notes every day, wrote it out word for word...
...The stillness in the church said God's mighty word had struck home...
...But there is a deeper problem...
...And in my experience, dullness on the part of the priest drives people from the church...
...Yet, as my wife and I found out by visiting various parishes in the inner city Sunday after Sunday, a lot remains to be done...
...How long do you spend...
...a minister is sent to build a Christian community-often afresh-by witnessing to the Word...
...I rest my case...
...Why can't priests preach...
...Compare it to the Protestant concept of minister...
...And it has, in many ways...
...They watch TV four hours a day...
...those moments we call...
...The greatest sin a priest can commit is to get up in the pulpit on a Sunday unprepared to preach...
...That's good," the older priest said with only mild enthusiasm...
...He helped people see the word of God in everything in their lives...
...Two years ago, at the University of Southern California Newman Center in Los Angeles, I caught that spirit as I rarely have...
...The only thing that can is a sense of urgency that preaching is the highest priority, that "Faith comes through hearing," and "how can they hear without a preacher...
...I guess eight or nine hours...
...second thoughts...
...A priest I know told me that a conscientious young priest confided in him that he worked really hard at preparing his sermons...
...But what if, in fact, the priest does not faithfully prepare, or cannot be understood, or somehow has an anti-charism...
...Having listened to sermons in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco during the last year, I am convinced that the high percentage of mediocre homilies is not just a San Francisco problem...
...There is a higher principle in sacramental theology than the integrity of the liturgy and that is sacramenta propter homines: sacraments are for the people...
...an earthquake...
...Pin-drop silence...
...One possible solution, importing priests from abroad, does not bode well for preaching, as many such priests speak with accents that are virtually incomprehensible from the pulpit...
...on Jeremiah...
...But by the second sentence of the homily the church was perfectly still, for the priest had prepared...
...It is a worldwide Catholic problem, and-in an age of mushrooming disbelief- a serious one...
...Preaching is inseparable from the notion of conversion...
...So, at the Safeway store as you look over the wine aisle this week, ask yourself: When the temptations swirl around me, will it be Chablis or...
...So, he went to his son and said: 'Chablis, will you help me in the vineyard?' Chablis answered: 'Yes, of course.' But Chablis, distracted by friends, got in his red sports car, drove down to San Francisco and was never heard from again" [spontaneous laughter...
...The speaker was my brother, Eugene, preeminent preacher and Paulist theologian...
...If this is true, it is terrifying...
...Doing his impromptu thing, he cannot hear the teeth gnashing or the minds clicking off...
...he was moved with pity at the sight of the sick and the crippled, the blind and the deaf...
...I couldn't remember the last time I had seen so many men at Mass...
...It is the book on which the church meditates, the well from which it drinks...
...The priest was hardly prepossessing...
...It means the priest must read: the Scriptures, above all, but theology, history, biography, good fiction, journals, magazines, or newspapers...
...They do and it does...
...He wept over Jerusalem...
...After Mass, as I thanked the priest (which I always do when I hear a well-prepared sermon), I asked him how much time he had spent preparing...
...I encountered that sense of urgency last summer in the Castro, the gay district of San Francisco...
...The Spirit of Christ is the Spirit of a missionary, one sent to the people "groaning for redemption...
...I empathize with priests today...
...I was caught up in his spirit...
...In the early stages of the Pastoral Planning Commission, it was the laity-not the priests-who felt the archdiocesan plan should emphasize the evangelization of San Francisco...
Vol. 122 • April 1995 • No. 7
